


giving me the feeling of a lightning strike

by sixtywattgloom



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: F/M, Genderswap
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-13
Updated: 2014-05-13
Packaged: 2018-01-24 14:25:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,341
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1608371
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sixtywattgloom/pseuds/sixtywattgloom
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>He thinks if she stole his whole wardrobe, he’d probably just buy a new one.</i> in which lou likes stealing liam's clothes and liam doesn't totally hate it. (au)</p>
            </blockquote>





	giving me the feeling of a lightning strike

**Author's Note:**

> so i really really wanted to write something short enough that i could finish and this is what ended up happening. i'm hoping it isn't terrible so yk pray4me? oh, and i'm [worldsofno](http://worldsofno.tumblr.com) on tumblr, if that's interesting to you. (also, i almost called it "mama i'm in love with a criminal," because i think i'm funny sometimes. but the title at present is from the vamps' "somebody to you.")

The first thing Liam remembers about Lou is the way she looked wearing his hat.

*

There isn’t much time to notice anything else, when he meets her: she swipes it the second Zayn introduces them, fits it onto her head like a challenge. But he’s too bewildered and tipsy to know what to say, and by the time it occurs to him that he might never see it again, it kind of feels like it already belongs to her. The speakers have been pounding music that he feels hammering through his insides, but somehow her name sticks in his head immediately, the way his favorite Kanye songs always do.

When he wakes up the next day, he’s overwhelmed by a ringing in his ears and faces swimming behind his eyelids that he can’t quite recall. He wakes up to nausea and a missing hat and _Lou, Lou, Lou_ , like a steady rhythm just behind his eyes. 

*

The next time he meets her, it’s his jacket he loses. He finds her outside, and for a moment, framed against the balcony, he realizes how small she is. It must be the stillness, the quiet—one meeting at one university party and he knows she’s used to filling up any room. Every room.

“Paynoooo,” she drawls when she spots him, smiling and reaching up to ruffle his hair. “Fucking freezing out here! You’re not using this, are you?”

Liam only manages a no by the time she’s already midway through wrangling his coat off of him. It makes her look smaller, somehow: she rolls the sleeves up four times to fit her wrists, and it falls to her mid-thighs, more a dress than anything. “Knew I could count on you,” she tells him, and he thinks maybe he minds less than he should. He thinks that he would have offered, given another minute, and he wonders if Lou would have taken it then.

He thinks if she stole his whole wardrobe, he’d probably just buy a new one.

*

He doesn’t see his missing hat or his missing coat until months later, when his trousers are around his knees and her legs are bracketing his hips and she’s riding him until he’s breathless, until he’s leaning forward to press messy kisses against her mouth so they won’t wake up either of her roommates in the next room over.

 _Lou, Lou, Lou_ , comes the pulse between his ears, and it’s only when she presses a finger to his lips that he realizes he’s been saying it aloud.

He sees his jacket between the bed and the wall after he comes, finds his hat thrown into the absolute havoc on top of her desk with the taste of her still on his tongue.

“Not a virgin, are you, Liam,” she says, afterwards, patting his cheek but smiling too softly not to mean it a little.

“Could just be a natural,” Liam offers, boneless and pleased.

“No one’s that kind of a natural,” Lou affirms, leaning up from between his arms to nip at his collarbone.

For the next two days he’ll have two little fang marks there, like he’s been sucked dry by a vampire.  And, really, who’s to say he hasn’t? 

*

When he brings her back to his room for the first time, he knows he’s putting his entire wardrobe at risk. But she kisses him like it’s worth all his favorite clothes, and when he wakes up to a girl drowning in his most recent Jay-Z t-shirt he thinks other people in the world have probably made worse choices.

*

It starts like this: a girl with fangs for teeth and the whirlwind force of someone five times her size wraps one of his coats around herself and says, “You’re letting me keep this, right?”

He thinks she means it like a statement, at first, the way she usually does, but when he turns back she’s still looking at him. Like she wants an answer. Like she wants an answer from _him_.

“Oh, uh,” he starts, struck dumb, and he sees the smirk edging up the corner of her mouth like she’s about to mock him. But she _doesn’t_ , and there’s something strange about the way she’s looking at him, not hesitant but not invulnerable, either. Like she’s searching for something, and she’s not sure what she’ll find.

“Yeah,” he finishes, finally. “It’s all yours.”

She smiles the beaming kind of smile that wrinkles the corner of her eyes and clenches his stomach, and when she kisses him it feels like a first something.

It occurs to him, after she’s closed the door behind her, that they stopped talking about the coat a long time ago.

“It’s all yours,” he whispers again, because he likes the way it sounds, and he likes the way he knows Lou would mock him mercilessly for having stupid conversations with himself, and he likes her.

She wears his jacket around until it’s so threadbare it's see through, and she never wakes up in anyone else’s bed.

*

She’s buried in the corner of their couch, looking somewhere between exhausted and vicious, but when he presses the tea into her hands she softens. “Knew I kept you around for something,” she says, voice hoarse, the wear of last night’s party settling heavy on her.

He couldn’t make it, this time—there were exams to worry about, and though Lou had coaxed him into plenty of her adventures, she let this one go more easily than he expected. Maybe she could read it in his tone, or maybe they both knew how much it mattered to him, but it meant that she’d gotten absolutely shit-faced without him for the first time in at least seven months.

He presses a kiss to her temple, and she sinks into his side; everything she’s wearing belongs—or belonged, at one point in their lives—to him: the t-shirt, the jumper, the boxer shorts she has on underneath it all.

Occasionally he pretends to mind, but she always seems to answer that by climbing into his lap and pressing her hips down against him and waiting until he admits how much he loves it before she’ll let him come. So, no—he really, really doesn’t mind, and Lou knows it, and he’s always been a bit hopeless at pretending otherwise. Sometimes he nuzzles into her neck, her skin against his nose and his sweatshirt against his mouth, and sometimes he drags her into his lap by the sleeve of his jumper and kisses her like there’s not much point doing anything else, anyway.

 “Could you just – be a dear and grab a scalpel and carve out my brain? I think that’d do wonders,” Lou mumbles against his chest.

He knows if he were anyone else, she’d have sent him away ages ago: told him to piss off, to give someone else a fucking headache, that he should probably get his lop-sided ears checked out (an insult she’d used on one of her friend’s boyfriend’s who’d thought approaching her in a mood like this would be a wise idea; he spent the next three months worriedly examining himself in every mirror he encountered).

But Liam’s Liam, and he knows where she likes her head massaged, and he knows what’s too much, and he can read her winces as well as he can read her snarling.

“Got your hangover t-shirt in the bathroom,” he says, because she always wears his soft cotton on days like this, when the world’s spinning around her and she wants to murder everyone (more than usual, anyway).

“You’re okay, Payno,” she tells him when he helps pull it over her head, her smile tired and genuine.

“Don’t hate you, either,” Liam says.

“You love me, you sick fuck,” Lou mumbles into his shoulder, and Liam thinks there’s a chance he could be the luckiest bloke in the world.

Anyway, at least he knows that he can open his drawers any day of the week and always expect to find socks. Even the Batman ones.


End file.
